‘I don’t mind when a Scotsman says it,’ remarked my husband magnanimously. The ethnically sensitive word in question was outwith.
The Stornoway Gazette announced in 1998: ‘On Christmas Day and outwith these hours, arrangements to have urgent prescriptions dispensed may be made by ’phoning 701472.’ I like the apostrophe in ’phoning. Short for telephoning, as ’bus is for omnibus.
Good writers use outwith. ‘He’d wanted to buy a place there, but it had been too isolated for his wife – and outwith their means anyway,’ wrote Ian Rankin in Dead Souls (1999). There it means ‘beyond’, as in a discussion in the Daily Star, by a real referee, of Connor Goldson’s treatment last month by a Video Assistant Referee on the matter of handball: ‘It looks as if it’s going to hit his head, so he’s not making his body unnaturally bigger. Another key factor here is, are his hands outwith his body? No.’
Outwith has its correlative inwith, which the OED calls ‘obsolete except Scottish’. Gavin Douglas used it in his translation of the Aeneid, making Turnus jump on board or inwith burd a ship. Elsewhere he uses within burd for ‘on board’. But his Aeneid was published in 1513; do sailors still say either within board or inwith board?
Such phrases may survive as fossils, as in the case of outboard motor. Outboard has even been adopted by nuclear physics to specify ‘the area surrounding the outside surface of the plasma chamber of a tokamak’. A tokamak is a Russian semi-acronym for a toroidal magnetic chamber with a magnetic field: toroidalnaya kamera s magnítnym polem, so the OED tells me. (Here polem is something of a false friend. One might be tempted to think it meant ‘magnetic pole’. But it means ‘magnetic field’. Polem is related to Serbian polje, ‘field’, as in Kosovo Polje, ‘Blackbird Field’, where the battle of Kosovo was fought in 1389.) A century ago it was normal to pronounce outwith stressed on the first syllable. Not now. Forces are at work outwith our control.
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